Based on different shoe upper materials, shoes have different fabrication methods and shoe upper structures. The shoe upper and fabrication method discussed herein are mainly associated with a shoe upper material made of a fabric for shoes. For example, a known technology is as disclosed by the Taiwan Patent Publication No. 201609010. This disclosure provides a shoe object including a shoe upper and a sole structure secured to the shoe upper. The shoe object of the above current technology is knitted by a flat bed knitting machine. In addition to a slow knitting speed of a flat bed, the knitting shoe object further needs manual splicing and sewing to form the shoe upper, resulting in an issue that factories are incapable of reducing production costs.
In another known technology as the Taiwan Patent Publication No. 201603735 disclosing a shoe object, the shoe object includes a seamless sleeve portion or fabric shoe upper formed by a knitting assembly removed from one single warp knit fabric element. From the content of the above known technology, the seamless sleeve portion or fabric shoe upper of the above known technology is knitted by a circular knitting machine. The circular knitting machine solves the issue of a slow speed of a flat knitting machine. However, to knit the shoe object using the above known technology, in addition to the issue of the procedure of manual splicing and sewing, excessive parts of the shoe object need to be first trimmed before the splicing procedure. Thus, due to the waste material produced by the excessive parts trimmed off, not only production costs are increased by also a waste in raw materials is further caused.
In another known technology as the Taiwan Patent No. M400227 disclosing a sock shoe, the sock shoe includes a sock body. The sock body includes a foot covering portion including an end opening, and a sleeve portion extending outwards from the end opening of the foot covering portion. The sock shoe further includes an insulation layer, which is made of an elastic material and is a formed integral to appear shoe-shaped at a surface of the foot covering portion. In this known technology, the sock body is first knitted, and is then processed to fabricate the shoe. However, the sock body itself is not exactly suitable for directly fabricating into a shoe upper, with main reasons being as follows. First of all, an elastic yarn (a fiber material with flexibility), as the main knitting material when the sock body is knitted, is extremely prone to deformation due to an external force when employed as the shoe upper. Even with a shaping object (the insulation layer in an elastic material) covering the sock body, the shaping object may be easily broken or damaged as the sock body lacks a supporting effect. Secondly, although the thickness of the sock body may be increased by a double-sided knitting method during the knitting process, the sock body is nonetheless a single-layer fabric. In order to wear the sock body as the shoe upper of a shoe, the sock body needs to have support and wear resistance greater than those of a common fabric. However, the sock body has not only insufficient support but is also a single-layer fabric with lower wear resistance, and is thus an inappropriate material for directly fabricating into a shoe upper. Thirdly, another sock body may accommodate around the original sock body to form a double-layer fabric and to thus further reinforce the wear resistance of the sock body. However, as the two separate sock bodies need to be appropriately sleeved with each other, the alignment process of the corresponding edges and corners inevitably encounter increased complications, and can only be completed with great amounts of experience and manpower, or else product defective rate may be increased to contrarily lead to increased labor and time costs.